Andrew Jackson SSC: Trust Me

[Alex Ptacek]

Question for you coach.

Since the models for trust are all based on the trustor's perception of the coach, is there a way for the coach to fudge these qualities, benevolence, ability, etc.? It often seems like the most popular and profitable coaches, especially on the Internet, have only a superficial level of interest in their clients progress. Do you think there is a reason to believe that the best model is to actually genuinely exhibit these qualities?

[Andrew Jackson]

Since the models for trust are all based on the trustor's perception of the coach, is there a way for the coach to fudge these qualities, benevolence, ability, etc.?

Another person's perception can't be "fudged" - it is their reality. I think what you're asking is if a coach can intentionally try to manipulate someone else's perception for their own profit. To that question, I think the answer is yes. Building trust is useful for sales and marketing as the seller needs to convince the buyer to trust them enough to hand over with their money. A cynical approach could include intentionally manipulating the trustor using this model to achieve an objective. This happens all the time in business, politics, personal relationships, and, certainly, on the internet.

Keep in mind that while I wrote the article from the perspective of the coach, this is also useful for the client or trustor. By paying attention to your perceptions and outcomes one is able to take ownership of the decision to trust another - to be vulnerable. Often people don't realize that they are choosing to trust someone else and then when the outcomes don't meet their expectations they get upset and blame the person they trusted for hurting them or violating them or just being a bad person. Who really made the choice to be vulnerable, though? In other words, who in the model own's the choice and the outcome? The trustor.

This is an important point: I own my actions and the consequences that come from my choices. Things that happen as a result of my choices are because I made the choice even if things didn't turn out the way I intended or someone else acted in a way that I didn't expect. It's not their "fault." It's then my choice to act based on the updated outcome and perceptions.

It often seems like the most popular and profitable coaches, especially on the Internet, have only a superficial level of interest in their clients progress. Do you think there is a reason to believe that the best model is to actually genuinely exhibit these qualities?

I don't think that would be a more accurate model. The purpose of the model is to explain what was observed in research conducted on trust not to present the "right" way to act. A model for the way to act is much beyond the scope of this article. Perhaps join a religion if you're looking for instructions on how to act. Christ or Buddha, for example, are models for how to act. I personally think that genuinely building trust is an important component of having personal integrity. That's my choice. I have found that I'm unable to be manipulative and feel like I can trust myself. In my personal experience being manipulative, in turn, inhibits my ability to be perceived as trustworthy by others. There are many people that don't act in this way and I suggest that you prepare yourself to encounter them frequently. It is very disorienting to interact with someone that manipulates your trust. There are people who are extremely good at it - so good that they convince you that you are the one that is being manipulative. Masters of deceit, whether they are doing it consciously or not, can flip your world upside down and pin everything back on you. Pay attention when you feel like you can't trust yourself and use the model to evaluate what's really happening.

Does that answer your question?

[Alex Ptacek]

Another person's perception can't be "fudged" - it is their reality. I think what you're asking is if a coach can intentionally try to manipulate someone else's perception for their own profit. To that question, I think the answer is yes. Building trust is useful for sales and marketing as the seller needs to convince the buyer to trust them enough to hand over with their money. A cynical approach could include intentionally manipulating the trustor using this model to achieve an objective. This happens all the time in business, politics, personal relationships, and, certainly, on the internet.

Keep in mind that while I wrote the article from the perspective of the coach, this is also useful for the client or trustor. By paying attention to your perceptions and outcomes one is able to take ownership of the decision to trust another - to be vulnerable. Often people don't realize that they are choosing to trust someone else and then when the outcomes don't meet their expectations they get upset and blame the person they trusted for hurting them or violating them or just being a bad person. Who really made the choice to be vulnerable, though? In other words, who in the model own's the choice and the outcome? The trustor.

This is an important point: I own my actions and the consequences that come from my choices. Things that happen as a result of my choices are because I made the choice even if things didn't turn out the way I intended or someone else acted in a way that I didn't expect. It's not their "fault." It's then my choice to act based on the updated outcome and perceptions.



I don't think that would be a more accurate model. The purpose of the model is to explain what was observed in research conducted on trust not to present the "right" way to act. A model for the way to act is much beyond the scope of this article. Perhaps join a religion if you're looking for instructions on how to act. Christ or Buddha, for example, are models for how to act. I personally think that genuinely building trust is an important component of having personal integrity. That's my choice. I have found that I'm unable to be manipulative and feel like I can trust myself. In my personal experience being manipulative, in turn, inhibits my ability to be perceived as trustworthy by others. There are many people that don't act in this way and I suggest that you prepare yourself to encounter them frequently. It is very disorienting to interact with someone that manipulates your trust. There are people who are extremely good at it - so good that they convince you that you are the one that is being manipulative. Masters of deceit can flip your world upside down and pin everything back on you. Pay attention when you feel like you can't trust yourself and use the model to evaluate what's really happening.

Does that answer your question?

Partially. I'm not as interested in the ethics of the acting genuinely, but more the results and economics. It certainly seems like the market would reward genuine trust connections between two parties. I think this is obvious with something like SSOC. A real study of this is probably beyond the scope of the model and would require some data.

What also interests me is whether or not the coaches' genuine interest in the clients progress has a measured effect on strength outcomes. Moreover, whether there would be a difference between in outcomes between the genuine and the manipulative. It seems extremely difficult to study, and perhaps only observable anecdotally. I also see your point that it might not matter. As long as the trustor believes the trustee to be worthy of vulnerability, then there would be no difference whether or not the trustee is invested at all. This might be where the role of self-trust comes into play.

[Andrew Jackson]

Partially. I'm not as interested in the ethics of the acting genuinely, but more the results and economics. It certainly seems like the market would reward genuine trust connections between two parties. I think this is obvious with something like SSOC. A real study of this is probably beyond the scope of the model and would require some data.

One of the papers I cited researched the impact of variables that influence the perceived risk of a consumer and a broker. In the scenarios investigated the broker had asymmetrical access to information and, therefore, a moral hazard of potentially cheating the consumer. The consumer, knowing the broker has that information, may perceive a risk of being cheated. While it's not the same as evaluating the difference between genuine and manipulative, I find it interesting relative to the trust model in that they were effectively estimating the impact of perceived risk. Here's what they found:

The model in this paper describes a principal-agent structure with investors as principals and brokers as agents, where the principals are subject to moral hazard by the agents. Investors and brokers are randomly matched and transact for a single period where cheating by the broker is possible. We show that cheating is more likely (and trust is therefore lower) when the social distance between agents is larger, formal institutions are weaker, social sanctions against cheating are ineffective, the amount invested is higher, and the investors' wages are lower. Most importantly, the model shows that the amount invested decreases as social heterogeneity increases, and when formal and informal institutions are weaker, adversely impacting income growth. These implications have strong support in our cross-country empirical work. Trust, and the social and institutional factors that affect it, significantly influence growth rates. Thus, this research provides a new insight into the way that social and institutional factors impact economic performance.

The model in this paper generalises to other principal-agent relationships, for example, creditors and debtors, employers and employees, clients and consultants, insurers and insured, and retailers and consumers. Further, our conceptual definition of trust, and our empirical measures, encompass prisoners' dilemmas as well as principal-agent incentive structures.

Several extensions of the model here would be interesting to undertake. First, the random matching of transacting agents could be relaxed by allowing the probability of a match between two agents to vary inversely with the social distance between the two, as in Akerlof (1997). In this case segregation increases, and time devoted to investigating brokers falls. A second extension along this line is to permit agents to choose whether or not to trade with each other using a matching technology as in Burdett and Coles (1997). Again, this would lead to economic segregation. With sufficiently extreme segregation, time spent investigating approaches zero, and trust ± the proportion of time spent working ± approaches one. There are potentially enormous costs associated with extreme segregation, however, as gains from specialisation may be severely limited, particularly where there are many agent groups, or where a scarce resource is concentrated within one agent group (e.g., Lebanese entrepreneurs in Africa, or Jewish bankers in medieval Europe).

Taking into account the value of leisure, and of transactions facilitated by trust that do not enter the national accounts, the model also predicts that trust should be positively related to subjective measures of well-being across countries or other economic units. J. S. Mill (1848, p. 131) argued that `The advantage to mankind of being able to trust one another, penetrates into every crevice and cranny of human life: the economical is perhaps the smallest part of it, yet even this is incalculable.' We thus would expect that more inclusive measures of well-being will be associated with trust in the same way that, as we have shown here, investment and growth improve with trust.

In short, and applying to the model of trust, simply having a perceived risk was found to have an economic impact by slowing down the transaction as the consumer spent more time establishing their perceived factors of trust. So we come back to the economic impact being more dependent on the trustor's propensity to trust and the environmental factors that facilitate a trustor to trust. Merely the potential of being vulnerable and the consumer's willingness to enter into a transaction determines the economic impact - regardless of the actual intentions of the broker.

What also interests me is whether or not the coaches' genuine interest in the clients progress has a measured effect on strength outcomes. Moreover, whether there would be a difference between in outcomes between the genuine and the manipulative. It seems extremely difficult to study, and perhaps only observable anecdotally. I also see your point that it might not matter. As long as the trustor believes the trustee to be worthy of vulnerability, then there would be no difference whether or not the trustee is invested at all. This might be where the role of self-trust comes into play.

I doubt that this would ever be quantified in research. My experience has been that good coaches are genuine and manipulative coaches are not effective over long periods of time. Refer back to the last line of the quote above "We thus would expect that more inclusive measures of well-being will be associated with trust in the same way that, as we have shown here, investment and growth improve with trust."

Keep in mind that in order for a manipulative coach to be effective, their client must subject their own self-trust to the coach. This connects to your last point that trusting yourself becomes essential. I believe an individual's ability to detect insincerity is largely dependent on whether they trust themselves and their intuition. My favorite definition for intuition is "prior experience presenting in a way that is not yet recognized." In my experience, people that don't trust themselves will repeat a pattern of choosing to be vulnerable, having negative outcomes, choosing to not to update their perceptions, choosing to be vulnerable with the same person (again), having negative outcomes, etc. This behavior pattern repeats until the trustor recognizes the negative outcomes as a consequence of choosing to be vulnerable, updates their perceptions, and no longer chooses to be vulnerable in the same way.

Interestingly, the client may be experiencing negative outcomes because they aren't managing a healthy relationship or boundaries with their coach. That is to say, again, that the trustor owns their actions and the consequences. A "manipulative" coach is only able to be manipulative because the trustor chooses to be vulnerable with them. A coach that is perceived to be manipulative with one individual may not be to another. The clients experience will only change if they effectively hold boundaries such that their outcomes change.

As the client or the coach, I need only be concerned with paying attention to my own perceptions and my actions to be or not be vulnerable. This is an important philosophical underpinning within of the trust model and implications of the article: I am in control of the world I create and how I choose to interact with my perceived world.